It (54 page)

Richie held his nose.

Bill grinned in spite of his thumping heart. “Th-They d-don't luh-luh-hike rock and r-roll,” he said. “They g-gave me this wuh-one for my b-b-birthday. Also two P-Pat B-B-Boone records and Tuh-Tuh-Tommy Sands. I keep L-L-Little Ruh-Richard and Scuh-hreamin
J-Jay Hawkins for when they're not h-here. But if she hears the m-m-music she'll th-think we're i-in m-my room. C-C-Come o-on.”

George's room was across the hall. The door was shut. Richie looked at it and licked his lips.

“They don't keep it locked?” he whispered to Bill. Suddenly he found himself hoping it
was
locked. Suddenly he was having trouble believing this had been his idea.

Bill, his face pale, shook his head and turned the knob. He stepped in and looked back at Richie. After a moment Richie followed. Bill shut the door behind them, muffling the Fleetwoods. Richie jumped a little at the soft snick of the latch.

He looked around, fearful and intensely curious at the same time. The first thing he noticed was the dry mustiness of the air—
No one's opened a window in here for a long time,
he thought.
Heck, no one's
breathed
in here for a long time. That's really what it feels like.
He shuddered a little at the thought and licked his lips again.

His eye fell on George's bed, and he thought of George sleeping now under a comforter of earth in Mount Hope Cemetery. Rotting there. His hands not folded because you needed two hands to do the old folding routine, and George had been buried with only one.

A little sound escaped Richie's throat. Bill turned and looked at him enquiringly.

“You're right,” Richie said huskily. “It's spooky in here. I don't see how you could stand to come in alone.”

“H-He was my bruh-brother,” Bill said simply. “Sometimes I w-w-want to, is a-all.”

There were posters on the walls—little-kid posters. One showed Tom Terrific, the cartoon character on Captain Kangaroo's program. Tom was springing over the head and clutching hands of Crabby Appleton, who was, of course, Rotten to the Core. Another showed Donald Duck's nephews, Huey, Louie, and Dewie, marching off into the wilderness in their Junior Woodchucks coonskin caps. A third, which George had colored himself, showed Mr. Do holding up traffic so a bunch of little kids headed for school could cross the street,
MR. DO SAYS WAIT FOR THE CROSSING GUARD
!, it said underneath.

Kid wasn't too cool about staying in the lines,
Richie thought, and then shuddered. The kid was never going to get any better at it, ei
ther. Richie looked at the table by the window. Mrs. Denbrough had stood up all of George's rank-cards there, half-open. Looking at them, knowing there would never be more, knowing that George had died before he could stay in the lines when he colored, knowing his life had ended irrevocably and eternally with only those few kindergarten and first-grade rank-cards, all the idiot truth of death crashed home to Richie for the first time. It was as if a large iron safe had fallen into his brain and buried itself there.
I could die!
his mind screamed at him suddenly in tones of betrayed horror.
Anybody could! Anybody could!

“Boy oh boy,” he said in a shaky voice. He could manage no more.

“Yeah,” Bill said in a near-whisper. He sat down on George's bed. “Look.”

Richie followed Bill's pointing finger and saw the photo album lying closed on the floor.
MY PHOTOGRAPHS
, Richie read.
GEORGE ELMER DENBROUGH, AGE
6.

Age 6!
his mind shrieked in those same tones of shrill betrayal.
Age 6 forever! Anybody could! Shit! Fucking anybody!

“It was oh-oh-open,” Bill said. “B-Before.”

“So it closed,” Richie said uneasily. He sat down on the bed beside Bill and looked at the photo album. “Lots of books close on their own.”

“The
p-p-pages,
maybe, but n-not the
cuh-cuh-cover.
It c-closed itself.” He looked at Richie solemnly, his eyes very dark in his pale, tired face. “B-But it wuh-wuh-wants y-you to oh-open it up again. That's what I th-think.”

Richie got up and walked slowly over to the photograph album. It lay at the base of a window screened with light curtains. Looking out, he could see the apple tree in the Denbrough back yard. A swing rocked slowly back and forth from one gnarled, black limb.

He looked down at George's book again.

A dried maroon stain colored the thickness of the pages in the middle of the book. It could have been old ketchup. Sure; it was easy enough to see George looking at his photo album while eating a hot dog or a big sloppy hamburger; he takes a big bite and some ketchup squirts out onto the book. Little kids were always doing spasmoid stuff like that. It could be ketchup. But Richie knew it was not.

He touched the album briefly and then drew his hand away. It felt cold. It had been lying in a place where the strong summer sunlight,
only slightly filtered by those light curtains, would have been falling on it all day, but it felt cold.

Well, I'll just leave it alone,
Richie thought.
I don't want to look in his stupid old album anyway, see a lot of people I don't know. I think maybe I'll tell Bill I changed my mind, and we can go to his room and read comic books for awhile and then I'll go home and eat supper and go to bed early because I'm pretty tired, and when I wake up tomorrow morning I'm sure I'll be sure that stuff was just ketchup. That's just what I'll do. Yowza.

So he opened the album with hands that seemed a thousand miles away from him, at the end of long plastic arms, and he looked at the faces and places in George's album, the aunts, the uncles, the babies, the houses, the old Fords and Studebakers, the telephone lines, the mailboxes, the picket fences, the wheelruts with muddy water in them, the Ferris wheel at the Esty County Fair, the Standpipe, the ruins of the Kitchener Ironworks—

His fingers flipped faster and faster and suddenly the pages were blank. He turned back, not wanting to but unable to help himself. Here was a picture of downtown Derry, Main Street and Canal Street from around 1930, and beyond it there was nothing.

“There's no school picture of George in here,” Richie said. He looked at Bill with a mixture of relief and exasperation. “What kind of line were you handing me, Big Bill?”

“W-W-What?”

“This picture of downtown in the olden days is the last one in the book. All the rest of the pages are blank.”

Bill got off the bed and joined Richie. He looked at the picture of downtown Derry as it had been almost thirty years ago, old-fashioned cars and trucks, oldfashioned streetlights with clusters of globes like big white grapes, pedestrians by the Canal caught in mid-stride by the click of a shutter. He turned the page and, just as Richie had said, there was nothing.

No, wait—not
quite
nothing. There was one studio corner, the sort of item you use to mount photographs.

“It
w-w-was
here,” he said, and tapped the studio corner. “L-Look.”

“Jeepers! What do you think happened to it?”

“I d-don't nuh-nuh-know.”

Bill had taken the album from Richie and was now holding it on his own lap. He turned back through the pages, looking for George's
picture. He gave up after a minute, but the pages did not. They turned themselves, flipping slowly but steadily, with big deliberate riffling sounds. Bill and Richie looked at each other, wide-eyed, and then back down.

It arrived at that last picture again and the pages stopped turning. Here was downtown Derry in sepia tones, the city as it had been long before either Bill or Richie had been born.

“Say!” Richie said suddenly, and took the album back from Bill. There was no fear in his voice now, and his face was suddenly full of wonder. “Holy shit!”

“W-What? What ih-ih-is it?”

“Us! That's what it is! Holy-jeezly-crow,
look!”

Bill took one side of the book. Bent over it, sharing it, they looked like boys at choir practice. Bill drew in breath sharply, and Richie knew he had seen it too.

Caught under the shiny surface of this old black-and-white photograph two small boys were walking along Main Street toward the point where Main and Center intersected—the point where the Canal went underground for a mile and a half or so. The two boys showed up clearly against the low concrete wall at the edge of the Canal. One was wearing knickers. The other was wearing something that looked almost like a sailor suit. A tweed cap was perched on his head. They were turned in three-quarter profile toward the camera, looking at something on the far side of the street. The boy in the knickers was Richie Tozier, beyond a doubt. And the boy in the sailor suit and the tweed cap was Stuttering Bill.

They stared at themselves in a picture almost three times as old as they were, hypnotized. The inside of Richie's mouth suddenly felt as dry as dust and as smooth as glass. A few steps ahead of the boys in the picture there was a man holding the brim of his fedora, his topcoat frozen forever as it flapped out behind him in a sudden gust of wind. There were Model-Ts on the street, a Pierce-Arrow, Chevrolets with running boards.

“I-I-I-I d-don't buh-buh-believe—” Bill began, and that was when the picture began to move.

The Model-T that should have remained eternally in the middle of the intersection (or at least until the chemicals in the old photo finally dissolved completely) passed through it, a haze of exhaust
puffing out of its tailpipe. It went on toward Up-Mile Hill. A small white hand shot out of the driver's side window and signalled a left turn. It swung onto Court Street and passed beyond the photo's white border and so out of sight.

The Pierce-Arrow, the Chevrolets, the Packards—they all began to roll along, dodging their separate ways through the intersection. After twenty-eight years or so the skirt of the man's topcoat finally finished its flap. He settled his hat more firmly on his head and walked on.

The two boys completed their turn, coming full-face, and a moment later Richie saw what they had been looking at as a mangy dog came trotting across Center Street. The boy in the sailor suit—Bill—raised two fingers to the corners of his mouth and whistled. Stunned beyond any ability to move or think, Richie realized he could
hear
the whistle, could
hear
the cars' irregular sewing-machine engines. The sounds were faint, like sounds heard through thick glass, but they were
there.

The dog glanced toward the two boys, then trotted on. The boys glanced at each other and laughed like chipmunks. They started to walk on, and then the Richie in knickers grabbed Bill's arm and pointed toward the Canal. They turned in that direction.

No,
Richie thought,
don't do that, don't—

They went to the low concrete wall and suddenly the clown popped up over its edge like a horrible jack-in-the-box, a clown with Georgie Denbrough's face, his hair slicked back, his mouth a hideous grin full of bleeding greasepaint, his eyes black holes. One hand clutched three balloons on a string. With the other he reached for the boy in the sailor suit and seized his neck.

“Nuh-Nuh-NO!”
Bill cried, and reached for the picture.

Reached
into
the picture.

“Stop it, Bill!”
Richie shouted, and grabbed for him.

He was almost too late. He saw the tips of Bill's fingers go through the surface of the photograph and into that other world. He saw the fingertips go from the warm pink of living flesh to the mummified cream color that passed for white in old photos. At the same time they became small and disconnected. It was like the peculiar optical illusion one sees when one thrusts a hand into a glass bowl of water:
the part of the hand underwater seems to be floating, disembodied, inches away from the part which is still out of the water.

A series of diagonal cuts slashed across Bill's fingers at the point where they ceased being his fingers and became photo-fingers; it was as if he had stuck his hand into the blades of a fan instead of into a picture.

Richie seized his forearm and gave a tremendous yank. They both fell over. George's album hit the floor and snapped itself shut with a dry clap. Bill stuck his fingers in his mouth. Tears of pain stood in his eyes. Richie could see blood running down his palm to his wrist in thin streams.

“Let me see,” he said.

“Hu-Hurts,” Bill said. He held his hand out to Richie, palm down. There were ladderlike slash-cuts running up his index, second, and third fingers. The pinky had barely touched the surface of the photograph (if it
had
a surface), and although that finger had not been cut, Bill told Richie later that the nail had been neatly clipped, as if with a pair of manicurist's scissors.

“Jesus, Bill,” Richie said. Band-Aids. That was all he could think of. God, they had been lucky—if he hadn't pulled Bill's arm when he did, his fingers might have been amputated instead of just badly cut. “We got to fix those up. Your mother can—”

“Neh-neh-never m-mind m-my muh-huther,” Bill said. He grabbed the photo album again, spilling drops of blood on the floor.

“Don't open that again!” Richie cried, grabbing frantically at Bill's shoulder. “Jesus Christ, Billy, you almost lost your
fingers!”

Bill shook him off. He flipped through the pages, and there was a grim determination on his face that scared Richie more than anything else. Bill's eyes looked almost mad. His wounded fingers printed George's album with new blood—it didn't look like ketchup yet, but when it had a little time to dry it would. Of course it would.

And here was the downtown scene again.

The Model-T stood in the middle of the intersection. The other cars were frozen in the places where they had been before. The man walking toward the intersection held the brim of his fedora; his coat once more belled out in mid-flap.